Roads

Roads are always fascinating, there are old roads , new roads, bad roads , good roads , superb roads and so on and so forth.

Roads have always casted a fascination on my minds ever since i started long travel by roads on our traditional annual road trip with my inlaws. My father in law being in automobile industry has a passion for longtravels on the road and we have a habit of traveling by roads when ever we get time. So far we have made trips from Jamshedpur to Puri/Konark and Chandigarh to Kullu / Manali (Of course both were on the cars manufactured by the company he is working for ;-) )

Thanks to the wide travels across countries , i have been fascinated by the roads of Singapore which are always clean with the trees on both the sides neatly pruned and the roads of Dubai which sand uses as a playground esp during harsh summer and roads of Cirencester which may have been laid by romans and roads towards my native which i would have used for more than numerable times in last 1o years have never failed to impress me regardless of their poor state but for the fact that they get me to where i belong to.

Roads are impartial to those travel on them and carries equally of good and bad. Lifeful and sometime lifeless. They never bother about the creed and cast of who is travelling on them and just simply dont care.

It must be really an interesting study to analyse the history of roads. To me , roads would have been laid to ease the mobilisation of the goods during the wartime by those who were in power and it looks like romans built a vast network of roads of more than 56k miles looooong back.

Roads are always hated when they are bad and gives you a bumpy ride and are rarely thanked when they give a very smooth one to destination and we cant forget the famous poem by Robert frost which starts like

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler,

long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth"

Roads have always played a vital role in determining the richness as well as greatness of a culture and have often been downplayed in the history except for few exceptions like Silk Road.

Roads are the first one which gets destroyed by the enemy force which wants to stop an advancement of an enemy troop

I dont know anyother road other than Silk road which would have captivated human imagination like Silk Road, it was infact not a single road but a collection of huge mesh of roads from China to Middle-East and beyond. It must have been really fascinating to have travelled around the silk road and meeting up those merchants/pirates en-route to your destination.

We are all travellers and take some road or other till we die and as Robert Frost depicted beatifully , are always in a diellema to choose which one to travel and which one to travel not to.

Irrespective of whatever your decision may be, roads are always there to take you from a point to point and they are designed just to do that, they dont care where you go to , but simply represent the present moment where you use them to travel , you dont thank roads when ever you cross them , but roads stay in your mind and they are the silent witness of what goes on and who uses them.

Road and Time are similar in certain aspects that they are just there , you just go past them in your own speed towards the future which hits you at 6o mins/hour.

So next time when you travel across a road, just spend a moment or two staring at the road to see whether you could understand anything that the poor road conveys to you, May be its a cry.

Will be back with more on roads later......